The Eleventh Hour
by The Redjay
Summary: Title: The Eleventh Hour  Word count: 2,242  Fandom: Doctor Who  Ships: Doctor/TARDIS  Characters: Wait and see ;   Synopsis: Repairs are always difficult alone.


It had taken the cloister bell for _her _to get his attention; it had taken the little girl less. That wasn't fair.

She wasn't feeling too good, but then she had been through rather a lot in the past ten minutes. A crash, the loss of a very good friend and the gain of a very good new one, and oh, was she in pain! Real, searing, literally burning pain. But since she'd met him, that wonderful stupid man that she had travelled with for so long, it had always been him ahead of her; there were no spare parts for him when _he _needed to be repaired. Once, she'd resented him and the way that he'd stolen her away from her quiet garden but she'd quickly grown to accept him and make room for him in her heart and in that strange way that she could she loved him. Compared to what they had, somewhere like the Medusa Cascade might as well have been a duck pond with no ducks! If she hadn't been so preoccupied with soothing her wounds and trying to find out where her travel companion had run off to for the second time that night, she would have been feeling rightly smug. But there were, as always, things to do and repairs to be made and binaries to be superseded and so there was no time to find him yet. He'd turn up, he always did. However, that didn't mean she wasn't angry and a bit hurt that she'd helped him through his lovesickness and later his god complex, only for him to run off to find a redhead and a crack in the wall when she needed his help and company herself.

And here she thought he preferred blondes.

She locked the door behind him, not out of spite so much as a need for safety, and tried to take in all the damage to both herself and their home. The task was a little difficult, when some parts were still on fire and in other places her axons and nerve endings had been utterly friend and essentially melted. If she wriggled that appendage _just _there… There we go, that was definitely wrong, just like she'd thought. That was wet. She might have been a little old, and probably outdated, but everything there was definitely meant to be… Dry. Mind you, what with the swimming pool where it was that was only to be expected, and at least she could fix _too wet _fairly quickly. It was too hot, too static, too loud, and too irreplaceable that she would have trouble with soon enough, and then of course too _ginger_. But it made sense to start where she knew without doubt her companion had not: the easy bits. She could go on from there, once she was able to fix too wet. She hummed in irritation. He could at least have helped put out _all _of the flames before he'd run off.

He would indefinitely launch himself face first into the tricky bits within a matter of minutes, but she would do the sensible thing and start with the problems she knew she could fix. One of them had to have their head screwed on right. Starting with the damp, or else the electrical parts were going to get suddenly very tricky indeed. The affinity for trouble, she supposed, had probably rubbed off on her years ago, but so had his curiosity and in recent years his need to preserve himself to preserve his kind, and so while she dried things off she set about a full-scale reconnaissance scan with the occasional wince and whirr of pain. No pain, no gain, as some of his past temporary companions had colloquially put it. But that didn't mean it was at all pleasant, once the pain had gone, no… The potential was more worrying than anything else – she couldn't see everything and everywhere, had no idea what could happen at any moment. At least _he _had functional peripheral vision. This wasn't the worst state things had ever been in, albeit, not by a long shot. Sure, a lot of things looked irreparable and messy, but she had worked wonders before and her companion had never given up on her, so of course she would pull through.

That was how things worked, and neither of them could afford for it to be otherwise. This was, for example, a much better lot than a few years ago, when she'd been used as part of a planet-wide paradox; the epicentre of the paradox, in fact. No, universe-wide, if he'd gotten what he wanted. She could remember every tiny detail better than anyone, including the man who had taken advantage of her and the strange immortal man who had helped to fix her, but she'd hardly known who she was, then, who she belonged to. But who she loved had always been clear. If she was too hot, and too static, and too loud today, then back during that years she had been more than simply wrong and unable to do anything about it. That link with her best friend and constant companion had been rudely locked away and a new command had entered her heart, a hand far more stern and far less loving than the one she was accustomed to.

She'd never been happier to see her travel companion again, when he'd found his way back to her, and she had been loathed for him to leave again ever since. But he had restless feet and a roaming heart and she was part of the reason that he did, and she couldn't have tied him down even if she'd wanted to try. That was one of the reasons why she loved him and his insane mannerisms, his gypsy way of life and the way that he didn't assign any one tool or fact to any one situation. Like the time he'd decided celery could be both a brooch and a ward against toxins. It was just a shame that she couldn't go literally everywhere with him, and experience it all, but she had had hundreds of years to accept that fact. And anyway, he always returned and sat to tell her the most wonderful stories she could imagine, when he got home, so she would never complain. And he'd be back soon again – he'd _promised_.

When he ran out and knocked on the door, rattling the handle, she didn't let him in. It wasn't that she didn't want to – it was only a little bit of that, and a little bit something else – but she was busy, and when he'd shut the door before it had locked and gotten shut; he could hardly expect anything else in the general chaos that was going on inside their home, and she had far better things to do that unstuck the door and let a no doubt agitated man into the middle of her workspace. He'd step in something, at the very least. Her companion would be all excited and jump around like a madman and if by some miracle he _didn't _manage to hurt himself, he would still hurt her, or hinder the repairs. No, she loved him but she couldn't let him in, and if she was being honest no, she didn't care, because she was still mad at him. If he needed to get somewhere so badly then his precious redhead could take him there and see if _he _liked being left behind this time. Well, left outside; no force in the known and unknown universe, in this or any dimension, could ever make her up and leave him behind. Nothing.

Not, admittedly, that she could have taken off right now in the state that she was still in. She'd gotten rid of the too wet by smoking like a chimney and steaming the main rooms until everything was well and truly dry, but now she had to find some way to vent out the smog, which with the noted lack of windows (something she wished she had time to fix) was going to be a little tricky to do. Under the circumstances she _had _considered knocking down a wall and rebuilding it with a window, a nice little porthole like other spaceships had, but her coral reserves were running low enough as it was for what she had planned for the repairs, and there was no point in making further work for herself when the fire, flood and impact had already wreaked such carnage. Even when she fixed everything up she was going to be aching for days, and her travel companion had better be there for her for at least some of those days. She just wanted to talk to him, be with him, and not have to move. Hopefully there wouldn't be anywhere incredibly exciting or far away that they had to visit for at least a couple of days. That was all she asked for; a few days to rest after she worked her carburettors and her flux capacitors and her limbs to the bone. Flexing some repaired wires tentatively, she felt the draft with a burst of alarm, but quickly worked out a plan. After all, she'd be in a fair deal of trouble if she, the last of her kind, wasn't capable of a little bit of maintenance and healthcare. The cracks in her hull could be used to get rid of the steam and be fixed later… There was still a lot to do.

Suddenly, a spark; the air was venting well, but she'd missed something, one little bit of water in exactly the wrong place. Leaving the smog to its passage she addressed the other problem, suddenly reeling at the security footage that flashed up on the screen. It hadn't been all that long ago but she'd already forgotten the cameras had broken too, and so they caught her by surprise. The pair of hands suddenly on the monitor, clinging to the doorway as it hung over the top of Big Ben. A scream, of shock rather than terror, and an unfamiliar yet so familiar head of messy brown hair popping up, followed by a shoulder and a body and the door slamming shut to hide the flames and travellers from the outside world, her travel companion back inside and heaving for breath with his back against the door. The footage cut off, and she let out another breath of smoke. Why couldn't he be more _careful_? She didn't want to lose him.

The only lucky thing about this arrangement, this method of rebuilding, was that her travel companion was by no other description a magpie. He hoarded things, usually useless things, and more than once she'd seen him go out with not the kitchen sink but pieces of it in his pocket. And he never seemed to leave without a banana, although that was then, and now he'd said he had a craving for apples. That was the hardest thing about his changes, she never knew what kind of person she'd be talking to when they came their way. But regardless of his severe mood swings and his cravings, he still kept the most useless things around their home, and for once in their life, so far as she could tell, those things were finding a use. Except maybe the bananas.

A pair of dials had been torn off in the crash, and an old kitchen sink did the job nicely. Separating the taps from the sink had been trickier than growing the coral needed to attach them to the console, making that particular system a sort of hybrid. Next, a gramophone neck functioned as a fairly suitable speaker, and a few broken monitors from elsewhere around the place could be easily taken apart and used to put together a new one relatively easily, with the buttons from one and the screen from another. Although since she'd taken the screen from an ultraviolet box, there would always be a faint glow around it. She'd hung it from a concertina that had once held a mirror that hung by the shower, because she couldn't find anything else. A typewriter replaced the old keyboard – retro, but she felt classy – and it, too, had a faint blue glow. Rather odd, she concluded, since everything else was faintly – by which she meant _strongly – _orange.

She'd finally let him in, because she'd started to miss that travelling companion of hers. He'd turned up when she called, his front door key glowing in the palm of his hand, and the second he'd unlocked the door she'd warmed straight to him again. No matter what he did or how he changed he was still her best friend, still her travelling companion, and she'd missed him and he _had _returned. And when he spoke to her and admired her handiwork, crouched down under the console and ran his hand through the puddle of black liquid where she had siphoned the last of the swimming pool leak, tested out all the dials and accidentally taken her to the moon and back – or maybe _not _accidentally, it was hard to tell sometimes – she knew she'd forgiven him for running off. The TARDIS hummed contentedly, playing with the Doctor, and everything went back to normal.

The only thing she hadn't been able to fix was one crack in the monitor...


End file.
